Points of interest

01/07/2022

Jiří Winter was of Jewish origin.
The father was from a Jewish family, the mother a Christian from Moravia. He loved animals. He spent his childhood helping out and observing at the zoo.
He became interested in animals when he was about six years old, when he received a dissected skull of an otter from his uncle, who owned a fish shop.
He was particularly attracted to animal skeletons, and this interest remained with him throughout his life. When he was eight years old, the Prague Zoo was opened. Father Karel Winter, a master glazier, went to the garden with a worker to glaze enclosures and terrariums, and little Jiří went with him. He wanted to be a naturalist! From an early age he grew all kinds of bugs and fish. Also tree frogs or newts. He was interested in articles about nature, in newspapers they used to be supplemented with illustrations of bugs and animals.
He liked the entomologist Obenberger from the National Museum, who illustrated his articles himself. Jiří wanted to become a naturalist, write such stories about animals and draw illustrations.
He was sentenced to stay in Bernau am Chiemsee prison, where he was prisoner number 6338
For active resistance, he received a commemorative medal II. Resistance
For the last five years of his life, he painted mainly with water colors, which he knew how to mix perfectly.
He always relied on the fact that he used high-quality paper for his drawings and was patient with high-quality colors. At first he used drawing cardboard from the pre-war stocks of Czech technology, later he ordered paper from foreign suppliers of art supplies. He used to order watercolor paints from a British company.
Proof of the quality of the materials used is their good preservation even after fifty or sixty years. In the last years of his work, he no longer made new drawings, health problems greatly limited his artistic activity, but he decided to color his old pen drawings so that they could be used for publication in books and calendars. He no longer had English colors, but he perfectly used the possibilities of even ordinary water colors.
He was married four times
He never had children. He didn't even want children. Whenever he saw his colleagues unable to devote themselves to their art work because of taking care of the child, he made sure that he was better and freer without children.
He loved to create children's board games, toys, illustrations and to support children's imagination, to create science quizzes for children and adolescents.
In the second half of the 1950s, he began to cooperate with the company Tvarový vývoj, which prepared toy prototypes. He mostly made graphic designs for board games, sometimes based on his own idea. In the company, toy manufacturers chose prototypes for implementation. Winter created around twenty models, most of which were subsequently realized by the company TOFA Semily. Some of Neprakt's designs are still sold today.
He was the chairman of the Club of Conservationists in Prague 6
He actively created competitions and events with the theme of learning about nature, animals and nature conservation He kept dogs, cats, scorpions
He drew in the late evening and night hours. After breakfast, he went around the newsroom and various meetings. At noon, he often had lunch with friends or had a work meeting.
He returned home around two o'clock and sat down to work in the afternoon. He drew for seven to eight hours and produced one, but usually two or three pictures. This included reading an assigned short story or book and choosing topics for illustrations. The number of drawings was determined by the contract. He composed pens and brushes after midnight, sometimes even at half past two.
All his life he passionately liked to visit museums and their depositories. Also exhibitions in which he sometimes collaborated. While walking around Prague, he visited galleries, antique shops or spice shops.
He was a foodie. He liked oriental cuisine, he was a frequent visitor to the Chinese restaurant in Vodičková Street.
Thanks to exhibitions, he visited France, Italy, England and Denmark or Cuba Traveling abroad from the Czechoslovakia was not easy and not everyone succeeded. Not even well-known personalities had many opportunities to visit Western European or overseas countries. Jiří Winter managed to get outside the borders for several days as part of the exhibition in Czechoslovak cultural representations in some European capitals.
The farthest exhibition of Neprakt's drawings was held at the TAP GALLERY in Sydey, Australia. Here he exhibited illustrations from the book Prague full of ghosts.
His most successful exhibition in terms of the number of visitors was the exhibition in the Cross Corridor and the Knights' Hall of the Old Town Hall in Prague (1980). Over 100,000 visitors bought tickets!
His drawing style changed over time from. of simple humor and finer lines, to the classic
Neprakt's bold line (from 1955), more accurate drawings and intellectual humor.
He started out as an illustrator of specialist natural history books, which he illustrated realistically, with detailed accuracy to the drawn species - its proportions and specific features. Illustrations of natural science books were illustrated by Jiří
Winter presented himself under his civil name, and even though the company Neprakta already existed, the drawings were so-called genderless - the reader cannot recognize the author from the illustration.
He owned an extensive ethnographic collection of ritual oriental masks, which was on loan to the National Museum. As a collector of curiosities, especially from the Orient, he was interested in history, culture, ethnography and all kinds of interesting things.
As an amateur anthropologist, but with specialist knowledge at the level of a scientist, he collaborated, for example, with Professor Emanuel Vlček in his research on the skeletal remains of Czech monarchs. According to the shape of the skull, on the basis of the so-called super projection, he created portraits of the examined persons. In his collections, he had dozens of human skulls with curious signs or stories, for example Indian skulls from A. V. Frič's expeditions to South America.
He had a number of ritual objects from African cultures. The Thimble Museum borrowed some artifacts from him for two ethnographic exhibitions, and the National Museum exhibited ritual masks from Tibet and Burma from Winter's collections
He had the memory of an elephant and a phenomenal insight into history, ethnography, anthropology, archaeology, oriental studies and the natural sciences. They called him THE WALKING EDUCATIONAL DICTIONARY. He has always been interested in anything that he found adventurous, interesting and extraordinary. He had a very good memory and was able to apply his knowledge to various, even unrelated fields. His photographic memory helped him in depicting historical situations and environments. His encyclopedic knowledge was admired not only by his relatives and friends, but also by visitors to discussions and exhibitions, when Winter liked to chat with people.

Points of interest

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